Thursday, January 16, 2003

Asus A7N8X

Since it's been a year since I last updated my motherboard / cpu / memory... it's time to start looking again for this year's upgrade. (Last year I bought a AthlonXP 1800 with 512Mb PC2100 for maybe $500-$600.) According to the chart I have, PC2100 supposedly has 2.1GB/s of bandwidth.

This year, I'm looking at the Asus motheboard which supports PC2700 (2.7GB/s) with the added fun that you can setup the DDR memory to be "dual'd" which boosts the bandwidth to 5.4GB/s (I only expect a 50-66% boost, not 100%) - that should boost memory performance from 50-125%. Coupling that with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+, which should be about 33% faster then last year. A rough guess puts the overall performance increase somewhere around 30-50%.

$160 - Asus A7N8X (review by Tom's Hardware)
$200 - AMD Athlon XP 2400+?? (2600+ is $300)
$360 - 2x512Mb, Corsair 184-pin DIMM, DDR333 SDRAM, 512MB, 64Mx64, CL2.0

Mmmm, total of $720. I could cut that by $140 if I only go with 2x256Mb of memory. However, I'm replacing a 1Ghz Athlon system with 768Mb memory (my 2nd game PC which is 2-3 years old), so I'd like to go with the full 1Gb of memory.

posted by Wuphon's at 3:19 PM